


make your home my home

by Quintessence



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Abuse, Canon Compliant, Canonical Child Abuse, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Post-Testing Gate Arc, Pre-Slash, also the most self indulgent, extreme tenderness, no onscreen violence but there is injury description jsyk!, this is just the softest fic u can imagine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 00:30:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20380693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quintessence/pseuds/Quintessence
Summary: "Every time Gon sees it, that face he’s come to adore, wide-eyed and beautiful and deceptively delicate, now marred with ragged, blood-red lacerations, some knot in his gut pulls tighter and tighter.  He knows he’s bruised and bloodied and swollen as well, but Killua looks different.  What’s been done to him looks systematic and practiced, the sort of violence that knows exactly how to hurt a person most while just avoiding any really permanent injury.  The sort of violence that goes on for weeks without end, until a person resigns themselves to it fully, no longer even going to the trouble to flinch.  The sort of violence that isn’t meant to defend or subdue or even dominate, but is simply inflicted for the sole purpose of causing as much pain as possible."In which Gon patches up Killua post-Testing Gate Arc





	make your home my home

**Author's Note:**

> howdy pals! i just had a really awful day (my wallet got stolen at a gas station! holla!), which occurred during a longer, also pretty garbage week, so once i'd canceled all my cards, i did what any sensible person would do--spent four hours writing the absolute most self indulgent fanfiction known to humankind!!!! and honestly i'm feeling much better now.
> 
> this fic was inspired by [this absolutely exquisite fanart](https://huyandere.tumblr.com/post/127649645571/gon-cleans-killus-wounds-after-zoldyck-fam-arc). look at it!!!! isn't it adorable??? it's so soft that i just had to write something for it!!!!
> 
> title is from autoclave by the mountain goats!!!
> 
> okay, enjoy!!!

Once the breathless joy of their reunion has eased into a pleasant, comfortable sort of warmth, Gon has to ask.

Neither of them really wants to talk about it, about the perilous specifics of Killua’s family. Of what they did to him. Have done to him, really. For a long time. Killua gets a strange sort of tension around the corners of his mouth when he mentions his family, like he’s trying to keep his face from absolutely contorting with despair, and quickly changes the subject. And Gon isn’t proud to admit that he’s quite deliberately avoided thinking about it. An immunity to poison can’t be built up painlessly, he knows that at some level, but to really dwell on it, to imagine Killua alone, shaking and sweating and retching after being forced to ingest yet another awful, toxic substance? It’s the sort of image he can’t help but force out of his mind. Better to focus on the Killua in front of him, the one teasing him and laughing and goading him into some pointless competition just for the fun of it. That’s the Killua he knows. The Killua he _ wants _to know.

But Gon can’t forget how Killua looked when he came face-to-face with his brother during the last portion of the Hunter Exam. That open, vulnerable terror, like an animal violently conditioned over an entire lifetime to expect pain. And his face now... Every time Gon sees it, that face he’s come to adore, wide-eyed and beautiful and deceptively delicate, now marred with ragged, blood-red lacerations, some knot in his gut pulls tighter and tighter. He knows he’s bruised and bloodied and swollen as well, but Killua looks different. What’s been done to him looks systematic and practiced, the sort of violence that knows exactly how to hurt a person most while just avoiding any really permanent injury. The sort of violence that goes on for weeks without end, until a person resigns themselves to it fully, no longer even going to the trouble to flinch. The sort of violence that isn’t meant to defend or subdue or even dominate, but is simply inflicted for the sole purpose of causing as much pain as possible.

So as much as he doesn’t want to, Gon has to ask.

“Your face,” he begins, and then pauses, selfishly hoping Killua will answer the question without Gon actually having to say it.

Killua looks up from the cards in his hand.

“What about it?” he asks, with a forced sort of nonchalance. He lays his cards face up on the carpet. “I win, by the way.”

Gon ignores what he’s certain is indeed a winning hand.

“What happened?”

Killua shrugs, but his shoulders don’t fully relax back down again.

“We’ve gone over this. I broke the rules, so there were consequences. Your turn to deal.”

He gathers up the cards into a neat deck and hands them to Gon.

“I mean specifically,” Gon says, hating himself for how hard it is to say this. “What did they actually do to you?”

Killua rolls his eyes.

“You’re turning this into a bigger deal than it is. Just shuffle the cards so I can beat you for the third time in a row.”

Gon breathes deeply and braces himself.

“It looks like…”

He trails off like a coward, looking down at his hands and picking at his nails. 

_ Just ask. You need to know. For him. You need to. _

“It looks like they whipped you,” he manages at last.

Killua says nothing, and it’s all the sickening confirmation Gon needs.

“So they did, right? How bad is it on the rest of your body? I’m guessing worse than just what I can see.”

“It doesn’t matter, Gon,” Killua snaps. “And for what it’s worth, you’re really starting to piss me off.”

“What are you talking about?” Gon demands. “Of course it matters! How could it possibly not matter?”

Killua sits forward and wraps his arms around his knees, holding them tight to his chest in a parody of an embrace. Gon can’t help but notice how gingerly he moves.

“It doesn’t matter because it just is the way it is! Whatever happened already happened. You making a huge, stupid fuss over it won’t change anything.”

“What if it were me?” Gon counters. “What if everything that happened to you over the past few weeks happened to me?”

For a moment, Killua looks horrified, his eyes going wide with fear and anger and utterly desolated heartbreak.

“That would be different,” he says, composing himself.

“How would it be different?”

“It just would! It would be different because it’s you! Bad things shouldn’t happen to you.”

Gon so desperately wants to reach out and cradle Killua’s face. He wants to brush back his hair gently and stroke his cheekbone and kiss just above that really awful laceration on his forehead. But he restrains himself.

“What you just said--that’s how I feel about you. Okay? Can you try to understand that? That’s exactly how I feel about this happening to you.”

Killua sighs, clearly annoyed but resigned.

“I just don’t like talking about it,” he says.

“That’s okay. We don’t have to talk about it. But will you just let me take care of you?”

For a long moment, Killua stares off to the side, pointedly not looking at Gon.

“Fine,” he says at last, like he’s making an enormous concession. And perhaps he is.

* * *

Gon finds a basic first aid kid buried deep in his suitcase. He sits Killua down on the edge of the hotel bed and gathers what he thinks he’ll need. It’s mostly gauze and bandages and disinfectant. After some deliberation, he leaves the sutures in the bag. Wishful thinking, he supposes.

Sitting on the bed, shoulders hunched forward and head slightly bowed, Killua looks so small. He’s a kid. That somehow feels like a revelation to Gon. He’s strong and brave and inhumanly determined--of course he is--but right now, he’s just a kid. A kid who’s been badly hurt by people he should be able to trust.

“Well,” Gon prompts, disinfectant and cotton balls in hand. “Can I see?”

Killua hesitates.

“I don’t want you to, I don’t know, freak out or anything. It looks a lot worse than it really is, okay? It didn’t even hurt that much. So don’t make a big deal about it.”

“No freaking out. You have my word!” Gon forces himself to smile.

Killua reaches down to the hem of his shirt and pauses for a moment. Gon waits patiently. He’ll give Killua all the time he needs. Killua breathes deeply and then, with a determined set to his jaw, pulls the shirt off.

Gon’s first impulse is to be sick. The sight of Killua’s body, raw and bloody and ravaged, makes his stomach churn dangerously. It looks like more of his skin is injured than not. Of the skin that isn’t broken, the majority of it is crusted with a thin layer of dried blood. _ “It didn’t even hurt that much.” _ Killua’s an absolute liar.

Gon’s second impulse is to gently, so gently, gather up Killua in his arms and hold him and press his lips anywhere Killua isn’t hurt. His hair, maybe. That looks like a safe bet. Just hold him and kiss his hair over and over and tell him it’s okay, it’s alright, he’s safe now, he’ll always be safe from now on because Gon’s never letting go of him, they’re going to stay together forever, longer than forever, and Gon will protect Killua, always, he’ll always be here, he swears it, he swears on his life.

“Staring at me with that weird look on your face counts as freaking out.”

Gon breaks from his reverie.

“Sorry,” he says weakly. He wants to smile reassuringly, but he can’t quite manage it. “I’ll get to work.”

He sits beside Killua on the bed and starts cleaning the wounds and wiping away the dried blood. He goes about it methodically, the familiar, repetitive task calming him. He goes as gently as he can, careful of the raw, broken skin. The antiseptic is sure to sting, but he tries to mitigate as much of the pain as he can, as if to say “Here. This is how you’re supposed to be touched. People should be gentle with you. See? This is what’s right. This is what you deserve.”

Gon doesn’t know when it starts, but his left hand starts rubbing small, comforting circles wherever there’s unbroken skin. Killua mercifully doesn’t snap at him to stop. Instead, Gon notices small goosebumps raising along his arms. He must like it, Gon thinks with a smile. 

He doesn’t know when someone has last touched Killua gently, but he imagines it couldn’t have been a frequent occurrence. He’ll have to do that more, embrace Killua or take his hand or gently play with his hair. Aunt Mito had done that when Gon had a bad dream as a child, stroked his hair until he could fall back asleep, and it had always helped. It had always made him feel very safe and cared for and loved. Maybe Killua would like that too. Maybe he would even rest his head in Gon’s lap and close his eyes in contentment and smile. Maybe he’d feel loved.

As Gon works his way down Killua’s back, he notices his ribs protruding more than usual. He’s thinner, Gon realizes, going suddenly cold. He’s certain of it. His waist is smaller and his shoulders are bonier and his face had looked a bit gaunt, hadn’t it? Gon doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t want to confirm how bad it had really been, but he has to know.

“Killua?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you… I mean, during those few weeks, did they… I… You, um, you weren’t given much to eat, were you?”

Killua stiffens.

“I always had water,” he says, entirely dodging the question. “A person can go a really long time without food. It’s water that really matters. And I had enough of that.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“Okay, fine, but the point is that I wasn’t going to die. So it’s no big deal.”

Gon doesn’t know how to explain that “not imminently life threatening” does not, inherently, mean “no big deal.”

“You’re hungry though, right?”

“I guess,” Killua says softly.

“Alright, well as soon as we’re done here, we’ll go into town and I’ll get you whatever you like. And some chocolate too! How does that sound?”

“Yeah,” Killua says, sounding somewhat distant and hollow. “Okay.”

Not quite satisfied, but no longer as desperate, Gon resumes cleaning and bandaging. Killua’s back had the worst of it, but his chest and arms aren’t pretty either, so Gon takes his time with them as well. He works his way down Killua’s right arm, trying to avoid absolutely mummifying him with bandages, however strong the impulse may be. When he reaches Killua’s wrists, he stops dead.

“You wrists,” he says softly.

“Yeah?”

“They’re all raw. Did they… did they chain you up?”

“Oh, yeah,” Killua says, with a sickening ease, clearly failing to appreciate how barbarically he was treated. “That’s just part of the whole thing. There are cuffs on the ceiling.”

The _ ceiling? _

“Killua, you know people can die like that, right? It’s called positional suffocation. If you’re suspended from your wrists like that for long enough, your own weight suffocates you.”

Killua shrugs.

“Yeah, but I can handle it. I’ve been chained up like that since I was little.”

“But you shouldn’t have to!” Gon doesn’t mean to shout, but he can’t help it. “Don’t you get that? You shouldn’t have to have learned to handle torture and starvation! It would be better if this bothered you even a bit, but it doesn’t! Being chained up and starved and whipped for _ weeks _doesn’t bother you at all, because you’re so used to being treated like that! That’s worse, Killua! Okay? It’s worse.”

When Gon’s finished, he’s breathing hard, chest heaving up and down. For a long moment, Killua’s silent.

“It does,” he says at last.

“What?”

“It, um, it does bother me. At least, it does a little bit. Just if I stop and think about it too long. I guess, having you care this much and worry and patch me up, it sort of makes me realize that this is normal. It’s normal to see someone you care about hurt and want to make it better. But my family never did that. They never cared that I was beaten bloody. I mean, they were the people who did that to me in the first place. I think that’s why I was getting so annoyed. Because the more you cared, the more obvious it was that they didn’t. That they never did. And I just wanted you to stop worrying so you’d stop proving that to me. So I’m sorry. For getting annoyed. You’re just trying to help. And I… I do appreciate it. A lot, actually.”

Gon can’t let himself cry. Killua doesn’t need that right now, doesn’t need to worry about Gon being upset. He needs Gon to be strong. So he will be. He swallows down hard and blinks a few times and when he speaks, he makes sure to keep his voice steady.

“Put your head in my lap,” he says.

“What?”

“Just for a moment, and then I’ll get back to work. But I… I want to stroke your hair. I think you’d like it.”

“Okay, sure, whatever.”

Killua rests his head on Gon’s thighs, and Gon slowly begins stroking Killua’s hair. He knows it’s futile, but he tries to put twelve years worth of gentleness into his movements. He tries to give Killua all the kindness and affection and soft touches he’d never gotten. And of course he can’t manage it in these few precious minutes, but that’s okay. He has time. He has the rest of his life to make sure Killua feels loved.

“Do you like it?” Gon asks, voice barely above a whisper.

“Yeah, I do” Killua replies, just as softly. “I really, really do.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you sm for reading!!! i reply to all comments (albeit sometimes a bit slowly), so no obligation to leave one but they do make my whole day!!! also i'm always available via [tumblr](https://storybookprincess.tumblr.com/)!!!!


End file.
